ATIA trip report - GNOME presentations & Java tools

[Peter Korn <peter korn sun com>]

Greetings,

Last week was the annual Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA)
Conference.  This year it was bigger than ever before, and for the first
time folks from Sun Microsystems gave presentations: on the built-in
accessibility features of UNIX and GNOME, on single switch access to the
GNOME desktop, and a panel discussion on what Assistive Technology (AT)
companies should expect when dealing with a large IT company.  This year
also saw the debut of a new kind of accessibility test tool - one that
evaluates the source code of an application to find likely accessibility
problems.


The first presentation was part of a 3.5 hour pre-conference session
moderated by David Clark titled "Access out of the Box?: Operating System
Accessibility and Compatibility."  Gary Moulton talked about the
accessibility features of Windows XP, Mary Beth Janes showed the
accessibility features in Macintosh OS 10.2, and Peter Korn gave an overview
of UNIX console accessibility and then focused on the rich accessibility
support being built into the GNOME desktop.  Peter first showed the audience
what the GNOME desktop looked like - and the full room of attendees saw many
of the familiar elements they've come to know from using Macintosh and
Windows desktops.  He showed how all of the operations one might do with a
mouse were available from the keyboard.  Then he brought up the Desktop
Theme capplet, and showed several of the themes developed for accessibility
- switching the entire desktop to High Contrast Large Print, as well as Low
Contrast and Inverse High Contrast. 

Then Peter demonstrated the open source assistive technologies being
developed for GNOME: the Gnopernicus screen reader/screen magnifier being
developed by BAUM Retec A.G., and the GOK dynamic on-screen keyboard being
developed by the University of Tornoto Adaptive Technology Resource Centre. 
These he showed not just with the GNOME desktop, but with accessible Java
applications, with the Mozilla web browser, and with the StarOffice
application suite.

Peter showed the screen magnification and Braille functions of Gnopernicus,
and then demonstrated how it reads the GNOME panels, menus, and dialog
boxes, as well as text in the StarOffice Writer applications (which like the
rest of StarOffice can read Microsoft Office file formats).  He ended the
Gnopernicus demonstration by having the screen reader read out loud a bit of
the HTML slides of the presentation he was giving in the Mozilla web
browser.

Then Peter launched GOK, and showed some of the ways a user with limited
mobility will be able to interact with the GNOME desktop.  With GOK in
"dwell selection" mode, he used a Madentec Tracker head tracking device to
track a reflective dot he placed on his forehead and move the mouse in
response to the angle of his head.  By making the mouse dwell within a
button in the GOK window, he was able to select those buttons and thereby
interact with the GNOME desktop and applications.  Peter then changed GOK to
"scanning" mode, and used a single switch to drive GOK, again thereby
interacting with the GNOME desktop.  Peter also demonstrated the special,
dynamic features of GOK.  He showed how GOK utilizes the rich accessibility
architecture of the GNOME platform to enumerate the menu items and toolbar
elements, and present them on their own dynamic keyboards allowing switch
and dwell users to directly select them (rather than having to select the
TAB button on the on-screen keyboard a series of time to get to the toolbar
entry).  He also demonstrated the special "UI Grab" feature of GOK, which
creates a special keyboard for dialog boxes and other windows presenting all
of the controls for direct selection of them.


In the second presentation, Sun was an invited guest to Tash corporation's
session demonstrating their line of USB switch devices.  As GOK supports the
industry standard USB switch interface, Tash's line of devices "just worked"
with GOK on the UNIX platform.  Peter again demonstrated the features of
GOK, and several audience members remarked on the power of those features. 
They felt that the ability to directly interact with menu and toolbar items
would give their users a big boost in speed and efficiency; it is so
powerful a feature they felt they might move to the GNOME platform to give
their users those benefits.


The final Sun presentation at ATIA was a panel discussion on AT/IT company
interaction.  Marney Beard talked about Sun's point of view, and discussed
the work Sun has done in building a rich, powerful, and extensible,
accessibility architecture into both Sun's Java platform and the open source
GNOME desktop.  By doing this, Sun has removed the burden of reverse
engineering the computing environment from the AT vendors, allowing them to
focus on features (as GOK has clearly done with its industry leading feature
set).  Further, by building this architecture into the platform, mainstream
companies that want to make their software accessible have a clear set of
interfaces to implement, and know that by doing so they will support the
assistive technologies being developed for the Java and GNOME platforms.


In addition to Sun's presentations, a very notable event at ATIA was the
debut of a family of products for software developers that helps them build
accessible products.  AccessABILITY introduced the 508 Wizard family of
developer tools which examines a program's source code for potential
violations of Section 508 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act's software
accessibility guidelines.  In their session at ATIA, they demonstrated their
508 Wizard for Java, and showed how a Java programmer could use their tool
to find and fix likely accessibility problems.  The tool allows you to view
the problems sorted by source file, or by guideline, and includes a detailed
help facility that provides examples of both the wrong and right way to
accomplish the tasks covered by the 508 guidelines.  When it finds a likely
problem, it highlights the line in the source code containing the expected
violation.  While the industry has seen a number of tools which evaluate
HTML pages for accessibility, this is the very first tool which evaluates
program source code.


The ATIA conference continues to grow every passing year, much like the
options and functionality of the accessibility support being built into the
UNIX environment through the GNOME accessibilty effort.  With the
introduction of developer tools supporting accessibility, we are steadily
moving closer to a far more accessible computing world than we've ever had
before.


Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team